In twenty three connected exquisite moments (or stories) the novel constructs a map of loss, its creative potential, its capacity to tear open the world, trouble boundaries, and dust the daily with wonder. In The Fifth Woman, grief is queer-as-in-odd, as in boundary-blurring, as in otherways loving, as in curious: Shadows come to life, dead deer talk back, a person you know is dead or fictional or both feels realer than anyone you’ve ever loved. To visit this narrator’s grief, a world cracked open by absence, is to find a different way of seeing ... the narrative goes on in the Beckettian sense, every day standing on its own, making its own kind of sense of the world, illuminated by small miraculous quotidian ... Sometimes the novel’s loneliness is so rich, it reads like a mystery to which we keep discovering clues: fragments of letters, a strange face in the mirror, offering hands, a growing crack, as if answers or Michelle or even Jesus might walk out at any moment and explain what’s going on, and how it is that a person can just be gone, and what to do about it ... You come to The Fifth Woman to remember why it is that you make words or stories or art, and the closeness of the creativity of grief to the process of art ... You finish it and then you turn back to the front page and begin again.

Short vignettes of her life...make up a sort of loosely connected collage of her grief. But in Caspers’ telling, this mourning is chronicled less as an explicit analysis of what is lost, and instead as quietly affecting scenes of a strange, painful and unusually beautiful version of the world that has opened as a result. The afternoon sun appears to shine in the middle of the night; a mysterious shadow of a dog plays companion; in her apartment over an alley she meets comforting strangers who seem almost like imagined characters.

The mundane becomes poetic in Nona Caspers’s novel-in-vignettes, The Fifth Woman. Its atmosphere of grief is established with tight, beautiful prose ... The book is a feast of atmospheric details, including everything down to the physical attributes of the narrator’s apartment. Her loss is not sentimentally dealt with; it is all the more devastating as a result ... More than anything, the story is told with control. There are no wasted words. The text itself is a pleasure; its sparseness leaves room for imagination. Verb choices in particular convey the narrator’s gut-wrenching emotions while demonstrating her ability to heal by connecting to the natural world’s flora and fauna ... the book’s conclusion is realistic, complex, and moving.

Caspers’s prose unifies form and content in a spectacular way as she writes the facts of grief, doing justice to both its devastation and transcendence, the sublime surreality it bestows on the world through the mere fact that one must continue to live in it. It is the quotidian and surreal aspects of grief and memory that accumulate to form the backbone of this novel ... Caspers’s tone is not quite that of an earnestly delivered elegy. Her prose behaves like memory itself in that it careens from association to association. In the hyperreal writing of isolated parts and objects, she sloughs off the heavy materiality of the things being described for the grace of that which they evoke. We see, repeatedly, how the narrator’s grief ruptures her reality, as she crafts multiple outcomes for various objects and events in her daily life ... In the wake of her partner’s death, the narrator continues to live each day, and in the altered state of grief, the mundane aspects of daily life are made magical by merely noticing.

Casper’s spare and lovely linked collection ... lays bare the heart and soul of the narrator as she tries to carry on with day-to-day life while being shadowed by heartache ... This gem of a collection is a transcendent portrayal of bereavement, showing how death elevates the mundane and affects everything humans do, see, and think.

Caspers’ writing is spare and deceptively straightforward, lending even her realist portraits the soft edges of a dream. Each vignette is short—some are only a page long—but poignant; as if Lydia Davis’ controlled remove had been sifted through the humor and immediacy of Michelle Tea. But it’s the accumulation of grief that matters here, almost as much as the details of domesticity, a quiet but tender declaration of queer love lost in San Francisco ... A writer to watch.